Friday, April 19, 2013

Quoted: “Senators say they fear the NRA and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember their teachers stacking them into closets and bathrooms, whispering that they loved them, so that love would be the last thing the students heard if the gunman found them.” Gabrielle Giffords.

Definitions: The troops being dispatched to Syria Jordan will be involved in “stability operations”. Y'know, like the 'stability operations' in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He's Heavy & He Ain't My Brother:The IMF, having forced more debt on Spain as part of the bailout it needed because it had too much debt, now warns that Spain's debt is “unsustainable." It finds that the country's inability to reduce its budget deficit is due, at least in part, to the austerity programs the country adopted at the IMF's insistence. The cure, they say, is “unprecedented fiscal efforts to bring their debt ratios to traditional norms," or, as they say in Greece – another IMF failure - more austerity.

Crime Pays: Of the 45 senators who scuttled America's desire to begin slowing the gun violence in the country, 42 of them have received money from firearms lobbyists.

Tattle-Tale: The IMF says that nearly 20% of non-bank corporate debt in the weaker eurozone economies is 'unsustainable' – for which read worthless. The banks, of course, get saved before the women and children.

Duck and Cover: On television BP continues to advertise how responsible it has been in cleaning up the gulf. In court it continues to argue that the other guy did it and tries to shift the blame—and cost—to its subcontractors. If Judge Barbier finds BP guilty of gross negligence, the fine escalates from $4.5 billion to $17 billion. If the responsibility is even partially attributed to the actions of Transocean, Halliburton and other subcontractors, then the gross negligence penalty goes way. Don't hold your breath, it'll be years and years before anyone pays a dime.

Real Deal: Small town America is not “the real America” - witness the way their Senators voted on gun control. The real America, the America where most of us live, looks pretty much like metropolitan Baltimore.

True Confession:"There’s certainly no consensus in academia, policy-making circles or among commentators over how the financial crisis arose, what the responses should be and what the consequences are for economics." They also don't know what quantitative easing does nor what it will do to us when it is terminated.

Perfect Pitch:“We kept hearing, again and again, that ninety per cent of the American people wanted us to vote a certain way,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) didn't say. “Well, at the end of the day, we decided that we weren’t going to cave in to that kind of special-interest group. If the American people think that just because they voted us into office and pay our salaries, benefits, and pensions, we are somehow obliged to listen to them, they are sorely mistaken.”

4 comments:

Gun control is real simple. The Constitution explicitly states that we have the right to bear arms. If there is all of this support for gun confiscation that the teevee purports, amending the Constitution should be an easy matter.

Sorry HS the constitution doesn't mention individuals when it talks about guns. Besides, the security state we have allowed to be built in our name will be happy to pry your assault rifle from your cold dead hands. Look at the "response" to the bombing in Boston as the harbinger of the sort of enforcement to come. Those who think they will "defend" themselves with their AR-15 don't stand a chance. But lots of kids and other innocents will die because the next whacko will use his personal arsenal . . . Until the militarized police arrive!

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